Today’s is a puzzling section. So, three major spiritual lessons, and some suggestions about the puzzles…
In chapter 10 God’s people end up in a big battle because of something spiritually careless they’ve done. In ch9 a group of Canaanites from Gibeon had come and asked for an alliance, pretending to be from a distant country. The Israelites make a huge blunder – not in making the treaty (making a treaty with a distant people would have been ok), but, we’re explicitly told, because they didn’t ask God before taking a major decision (9:14). And so they commit `by the Lord` to a treaty of peace with this Canaanite tribe – exactly what God had told them very clearly not to do (9:15).
So, first the spiritual lesson: It’s seriously stupid, when we face a significant decision, not to take time (maybe even fasting) to ask God to help us see things as He does, that is, not to claim His guarantee to give us wisdom if we ask (James 1:5). That might be enough for today: Lord, please help me create ways to remember this, remember You, each time I have a significant decision; thankyou that You promise to guide me in them (Psalm 23:3)!
But also, in the middle of what might seem quite a black and white book, we hit a moral puzzle. What do you do about this? Joshua has made a treaty with the Gibeonites, `an oath by the Lord`, and three days later he finds that they’ve lied their heads off; then again (these were not God’s people from whom better things were expected) their actions arose undeniably from faith, or at least from fear (literally) of the Lord (9:9,24), and were characterized by humility (9:25). So what should Joshua do when he finds out? What results is striking: God takes our promises extremely seriously, even stupid ones, and when Joshua’s commitment gets broken centuries later, God’s judgment falls on Israel (2 Sam 21 – as the leaders in Joshua’s day knew it could, 9:20). This reminds me of a friend who left his wife for another woman claiming he had only married his wife in the first place to stop her getting an abortion. Well, maybe, but a promise was a promise. God wants us to be people of truth, radically so.
But what about the Gibeonites – totally deceptive, yet out of fear of the Lord? They end up as a group of people whose destiny is to carry out menial tasks; which indeed they deserved (there is no reason at all to think they would not have been engaged in the same utterly appalling evils as all their fellow Canaanites). And yet there was the fear of the Lord: and those tasks are to be carried out, Joshua says, `for the house of my God` (9:23). `Better is one day in your courts than a thousand elsewhere; I would rather be a doorkeeper in the house of my God` – that too became their destiny; in eternal terms they benefited like no other Canaanites, more indeed than most of Israel. Strange and thought-provoking.
But, chapter 10 now: there was a cost to their commitment. Old friends became hostile. (If you aren’t a Christian and become one, don’t expect everyone to love you.) All the other Amorites from the hill country join forces to attack them. So now Joshua’s promise has got him into a fight. And it becomes one of the old testament’s most supernaturally remarkable battles; because in answer to Joshua’s prayer the sun `stopped in the middle of the sky`, extending the day so the Israelites could press home their advantage (10:13).
What do we make of that? Could God do this? Certainly! Is God the kind of majestic God who breaks into history (even keeping the solar system in a holding pattern if need be??) for the encouragement of a little group of His people? – just as (just once) He `prepared` a special fish for the sake of a prophet (Jonah)’s education? Do we think such a God was in danger of carelessly destabilizing the solar system if He values natural laws less than our spiritual growth? However, it’s probable that we’re looking here at a simpler miracle of refraction. Every day the sun is apparently visible for four seconds after it’s technically gone below the horizon; and at the poles that can apparently be days. `The sun stopped going down` is then the language of appearance, just like when we say `the sun came up`. However, let’s be very clear about this: God cares more about encouraging and training people – you and I – than He does about always keeping the scientific laws He created!
But what’s also interesting here is how God encourages in 10:8. Encouragement is vital for victory, and if we’re not encouragers, we should pray that God trains us to be. 10:8 – `Not one of them will be able to withstand you` – is actually nothing new; it’s what He said in 1:5. But God’s point is that it’s true now. Encouragement often doesn’t come through new ideas, but through things we know deep down that God brings to the forefront. This is what our daily Bible reading should do, and what hearing good preaching should do. It’s why we need both, and suffer if we lack either!
But Dale Ralph Davis’ excellent commentary points out what God doesn’t do; this time, unlike at Jericho and Ai, He doesn’t tell Joshua exactly what to do. Why? Because God the Creator has made us in His image, and so what He wants from us is creativity not inactivity, and He leaves space for that! Which in this case means Joshua deciding on an all night march and a surprise attack. God doesn’t want us to stay in bed inactive until we receive a special word to get out of bed – nor do we need a special word before we invite a friend to an outreach! Be transformed by the renewing of your mind, says Romans 12:2; the idea is that the wisdom of God we absorb daily from Scripture reshapes our minds, so that, as time goes on, in any situation we think about it God’s way. If our child is six years old we will tell them explicitly to look both ways before crossing the road, or have a bath, or put on a coat. We won’t do that when they’re 18 and (hopefully) mature. The great missionary Hudson Taylor said when he was old, `More and more I feel like a man walking in the fog`; it was a sign of the maturity God had wrought in him! God wants us to be guided not by continual external flashing lights, but by the internal guidance of minds soaked and reshaped by Scripture. God loves partnership; but His input doesn’t stifle our creativity, rather it stimulates our creativity. V8 God encourages Joshua, v9 Joshua thinks and takes action, and vv12-14 God is clearly pleased!
For God leaves room for our creativity, but He backs it with His power. Victory here comes specifically because of God’s dramatic power, vv11-14; as the text says, `the Lord was fighting for Israel`. The Lord is a warrior! Perhaps that isn’t very contemporary? Sometimes we feel God, Jesus, ought just to be pale and tolerant and meek and mild. But there is deep evil in our world, as there was in Joshua’s time: trade injustice, environmental destruction, massive abortion rates, the arms trade; worldliness in our media and education systems that blinds people to the gospel so that they head for hell. God hates these things and God fights these things. Psalm 24:8 is God’s self-revelation: `Who is this King of glory?… The Lord mighty in battle!` Is that part of my picture of God? It needs to be!
But why this miracle of the sun standing still in answer to Joshua’s prayer? – why this, why now? Just when Israel, and Joshua specifically, had made such a mess of things in chapter 9, because they…. didn’t pray (9:14)! So what God shows them here, very clearly (10:14), is how prayer can turn night into day. Of course there may be more to it: they needed to see the supernatural, that if there was victory it was above all because of God; and perhaps for the sake of the Amorites too – such a revelation would make it even more likely they would flee from the `promised land` that their unique level of evil had defiled. But isn’t this how God encourages His people; we may mess up, but we can always start afresh – and as we do so, as we truly repent, we can still see colossal blessing released as we pray in his name! As my friend Simon Cooke puts it: we will make mistakes, but that doesn’t mean God isn’t with us going forward; we need an awe at God, but we can still walk with our heads held high, proud of our relationship with Him!
For we too are called to war, to specific spiritual warfare; to `wrestling` in prayer (Paul’s description, Col 4:12), because the wrestling’s worth it. ‘Pray every day for your non‑Christian friends’, said Norwegian Ole Hallesby: ‘Surround them with your prayer. Each time you pray you plunge a holy explosive into their soul, and one day it will scatter the ice around their hearts!’ Specific prayer for specific people, that step by specific step they will come closer to God. Many African churches know this and they pray more than European churches do, and so grow more than European churches do! We too have the power by prayer to turn spiritual night into day, because God listens! Let’s do it!
(The main topics here today come from Dale Ralph Davis’ excellent book on Joshua. He’s written similar volumes on most of the OT historical books.)
EXTENDED FOOTNOTE ON GENOCIDE IF YOU WANT IT!: Sometimes these battle chapters, and the fate of the Canaanites, get cited as examples of immoral slaughter in the OT, even genocide. But clearly that can’t be the case, because Jesus’ attitude to the old testament’s flawlessness is unambiguous. So here are three things to bear in mind. (Leaving aside the fact that the Canaanites had had 400 years’ warning from God (Gen 15) but still practised uniquely enormous evil (Lev 18, leading up to v24, and Lev 20, leading up to v23): sacrificing their babies by fire, and sexual deviancy including sex with animals and every possible permutation of incest. The demonic influence (embodied in the Anakim) seems evident; Satan had garrisoned the `promised land` with a culture soaked in as much evil as possible. In such a situation, God’s judgment has to be a reality. Indeed as Copan comments, `No religious group that practised incest, ritual prostitution, bestiality [and] human sacrifice would be tolerated even in contemporary liberal societies.` (In fact in many places today, engaging in human sacrifice would itself carry the death penalty.)
But first, then, expulsion from the land, not extermination, was the heart of God’s judgment on the Canaanites (see Ex 23:27-33 and many other places) – just as Israel forfeited the same promised land centuries later. Secondly, the word often translated `city` in these battle accounts has a wide range of meaning, and probably means a military fort (it can even mean a village), rather than a place full of inhabitants. These forts may well have contained only fighters (plus with them, as one might expect, prostitutes like Rahab). Probably the wives and children would have been sent away when the Israelite army drew near. Copan even suggests from archaeological evidence that the walls of Jericho – which Israel marched round seven times before a battle – may only have contained a hundred men.
But thirdly, we have to get used to the way middle eastern culture used rhetorical hyperbole when recording significant victories (the Egyptians did the same). We can compare Joshua’s use of `everyone` who was killed to the way Mark 1 says `all the people of Jerusalem` went to be baptized. Indeed when it comes to conflict, even sporting conflict, we use hyperbole ourselves: we might say that a boxer `absolutely slaughtered` his opponent, but we don’t mean that literally. When Jesus says that a disciple must `hate his father and mother, his wife and children` (Luke 14:26), we know what to do with that, remembering how He cared for His mother even in His hellish agony on the cross (not to mention eg 1 Tim 5:8); and we have to do the same sort of translation with the use of language here.
In fact, as we read Joshua carefully, we notice that the very places where we might assume we’re being told there were no survivors, like Debir, the Negev, and the hill country (10:36-40), are still occupied by Canaanites in Judges 1 (see also Jerusalem in Judges 1:8 yet 1:21). Hazor is `totally destroyed` in Joshua 11 but has survived well enough to be a major power in Judges 4. That the Anakim are `totally destroyed` in Joshua 11:21 seems to mean the same as them being `driven out` four chapters later in Joshua 15:14 and in Judges 1:20, not that they were killed. This same `completely destroy` is said even of Israel in Jeremiah 25:9, but of course they mostly survived. I’m citing Paul Copan’s thorough and helpful study Did God Really Command Genocide? here, and he demonstrates this from yet other examples.
As Hofreiter says, `People at the time would have known not to take [such language] literally, in the same way as we interpret similar language when used in sports reporting today.` And Joshua 21:43-44 makes clear that God’s purpose in these times had been fulfilled, yet when we come to Judges 1 Palestine contains plenty of Canaanites. So, we’re clearly not dealing with genocide here. I hope this helps!
